Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 520 posts

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#361

Post by cwkoss »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #132
MithrilTuxedo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't small businesses best positioned to adapt to these changes? It's not like they're sitting on piles of cash or other investments that are losing value. If costs go up they'll have to raise prices, just as the prices for what they're buying went up due to rising costs further upstream. I figured the pandemic cleared out most of the small businesses that would have failed within five years anyway (half do). I wou…

> I figured the pandemic cleared out most of the small businesses that would have failed within five years anyway PPP and SBA loans kept these companies alive. The bill hasn't come due yet. This is what people don't understand.

I think most of those funds got sucked up by the legally savvy before most small businesses got a piece.

There are a LOT of stories online of companies taking the money and posting fake job ads where they never hire people while laying off a significant portion of their workforce. I think there are a lot of games being paid to get PPP forgiveness by companies that don't deserve it.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#362

Post by yc-kraln »

georgyo wrote: post #236
altcognito wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage gains are not being treated the same as investment gains. It's not like Bezos is taking home an hourly rate. Everybody at the real top is doing quite, quite well. That's why the concentration of wealth into a very few hands at the top marches on, not because of "wages".

Your touching on a much more complicated subject about reporting. If someone one owns a billion dollars of stock foobar, and foobar grows 10x, then that person is now worth 10B and "made" 9B. However they have not sold anything so while they can be reported as making 9B, they are none of it was directly cash and not taxed; at least not yet. However, while Bezos "only" has a salary/bonus of 1.5 million a year, it is v…

The thing is, when most of your money is in illiquid assets (stock, in this case, or houses, etc.) you can reliably get an extremely low interest rate loan against those assets. What does that mean? Let's say you have 10B equity in a company, and you want to buy a used 747 Jumbo Jet--a steal, at $500,000. You only have about $100k liquid cash on you at the moment. No problem! Go to a banker, take an extremely inexpensive loan out against your 10B (think less than 1% interest), and buy your jet. Because it's not income, it's not taxed. But yes, these people do actually have access to that much purchasing power, it's not just abstract numbers.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#363

Post by lotsofpulp »

openknot wrote: post #184
paxys wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only "duty" your employer has is to extract as much value out of you for as cheap as possible. If you expect anything different then you are going to be taken for a ride.

An employer at a for-profit company is responsible for maximizing the company's profits, but that doesn't mean it has a duty to extract as much value out of an employee for as cheap as possible. Such an adversarial relationship with employees causes them to leave, or at least avoid initiative or innovative solutions that are mutually beneficial to the employer and employee.

The recent Thedacare (a non profit organization) debacle in Wisconsin shows this is not limited to for profit companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThedaCare_Regional_Medical_Cen...

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#364

Post by CountDrewku »

mbg721 wrote: post #62
CountDrewku wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

What's the antidote? There can be new names for anything, but it's hard to get them to stick.

To continuously call them out on their bs and refuse to bend to them when they resort to childish name calling. "I don't care that you think I'm racist, your opinion is irrelevant."

As you can see they've already started flagging me for just mentioning the facts of what they're doing. I'm sure one of them will come along with some -ist inflammatory remark soon.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#365

Post by curiousllama »

codekansas wrote: post #301
curiousllama wrote: post #207

> But there are growing fears of a wage-price spiral in which workers, seeing rising prices, demand higher pay — and companies, having to pay their workers more, start charging higher prices. These higher prices lead workers to demand even higher pay, leading companies to charge higher prices, and so on. It's the inflationary cycle of nightmares. Can someone explain to me how this works? I'd assume wages to prices ar…

Presumably if the meat packers also raise wages to keep up with inflation, they will have to charge McDonald’s higher prices for patties. Similarly for lettuce growers, beverage bottlers, etc. All these would put small amounts of pressure on the price of a burger. If the ultimate price ends up going from 2$ to 3$, suddenly the 10$ to 15$ wage hike doesn’t mean anything (except for people who didn’t get the wage hike…

Ah, so it's necessarily a compounding effect across the supply chain, then? E.g. assuming 2.5% price increases: energy costs are 1.025x as expensive > fertilizer is now (1.025^2)x as expensive > crops are (1.025^3)x > beef is ^4 > patties ^5 > so now McDs pays 1.025^5 = 13% more on beef, pushing prices up >13% of their avg previous beef cost. The argument is that it could easily get above 50% given cycles in the economy.

Ok, makes sense - thanks

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#366

Post by cwkoss »

codekansas wrote: post #301
curiousllama wrote: post #207

> But there are growing fears of a wage-price spiral in which workers, seeing rising prices, demand higher pay — and companies, having to pay their workers more, start charging higher prices. These higher prices lead workers to demand even higher pay, leading companies to charge higher prices, and so on. It's the inflationary cycle of nightmares. Can someone explain to me how this works? I'd assume wages to prices ar…

Presumably if the meat packers also raise wages to keep up with inflation, they will have to charge McDonald’s higher prices for patties. Similarly for lettuce growers, beverage bottlers, etc. All these would put small amounts of pressure on the price of a burger. If the ultimate price ends up going from 2$ to 3$, suddenly the 10$ to 15$ wage hike doesn’t mean anything (except for people who didn’t get the wage hike…

Have you been to fast food recently? It feels like prices have tripled over the past decade, outpacing reported inflation numbers significantly.

In Seattle:

A mcdonalds medium fry is $4.12.

A taco bell bean burrito is $3.11

A burger king whopper meal is $12.39

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#367

Post by elif »

whatshisface wrote: post #356
speed_spread wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, War is not that random nor is it magic.

Nor is it good for the economy (see: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Iraq...).

that depends on which metrics you care about.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#368

Post by melenaboija »

lostlogin wrote: post #304
melenaboija wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also is even painful to me to think about frivolities and how people spend money when seeing things like this. “Lamborghini had its most profitable year ever during the coronavirus pandemic”[1] Each of this cars may be something like 5 years of average salary in US. [1] https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/lamborghini-had-its-m...

Surely the much smaller individual sums spent on something like Xbox consoles is far greater in the aggregate than a few Lambos? As soon as you get into rating the worthiness of a spend it becomes a bit puritanical. The ironic thing is that I mostly agree with you, but judging others ‘wasted’ spend is too slippery a slope to go down.

Yup, I agree with you too and to me the slippery part is to talk about ratios.

Definitely absolute values have a meaning to me, otherwise would not make sense to talk about billionaires and non billionaires and a better classification would be starving and non starving people.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#369

Post by ahthat »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #285
hungryhobo wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you're still earning more than if you haven't gotten that 5% raise.

I think his point is that while a 5% raise and 5% inflation should be a wash, since you now pay slightly more taxes than before your pay after taxes is slightly less value than before. It's still very misleading to say "wage gains aren't good" though - the problem is not that you got a 5% raise, it's that inflation is 5% so you need a slightly-higher-than-inflation raise to keep up. If you didn't get a 5% raise you'd…

It’s too far to say that “”wage gains aren’t good”, but he makes a good point about wage increase, inflation, and tax brackets I hadn’t thought of before

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#370

Post by nickff »

sleepingadmin wrote: post #262

Why is the central bank inflation target typically 2%? Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies. If inflation is say 10%. Maximum employment is near certainly impossible. Debt will be expensive and the economy crawls to a halt. Who wants to pay 10% interest on their student debt? So where in between do you have a good price stability? It tends to…

>"Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies."

It's not actually clear that deflation causes economic problems for the commonly cited reason (decrease in consumer spending). I think you're right about most of what you say concerning inflation.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/111715/can-def...

Post reply on HN